COLUMBIA — Whenever India Moody looks at her face and sees the web of scars on her chin, she is reminded of the night her son’s father tried to cut her neck.
Moody was walking through her driveway to pick up her children from a neighbor’s house when Terence Stukes jumped her from behind. He beat her with a baton and repeatedly stabbed her with a tactical knife — in her back, her face, her head.
“He was trying to slit my throat, but I was fighting him off,” Moody, 37, said at a Richland County courtroom this week, her voice breaking from emotion. She pointed to scars all around her body, including her neck, chest and arms. “At some point, I collapsed in the street.”
Stukes, 40, has been found guilty of attempted murder and a weapons offense in that May 21, 2023, attack against his ex-girlfriend. He was sentenced to 25 years in South Carolina prison in July.
Moody’s quest for justice is not over. She has filed a lawsuit against Stukes and the Richland County Sheriff’s Department, an agency she believes is partly to blame for the physical and psychological scars she now bears and the financial burdens from her treatment.
India Moody describes the length of the baton that her ex-boyfriend used to beat during her testimony at a Richland County Courthouse civil case hearing in Columbia on Wednesday, Oct. 8.
In her January lawsuit, Moody said Stukes nearly killed her three months after he was taken off an ankle monitor. The device had been meant to track his whereabouts after he was arrested for allegedly stalking and assaulting Moody in late 2022. It was a few months after she gave birth to their son.
She said the authorities removed Stukes’ ankle monitor because the investigator in the 2022 case — Richland County sheriff’s deputy Adam G. Oxendine — did not show up at a hearing where she sought to maintain a protection order against her former boyfriend.
“As a direct and proximate result of RCSD and Adam G. Oxendine’s acts and/or omissions, the Plaintiff suffered stabbing wounds to her head, back, face and injuries to her knees and body,” Moody said in her complaint, referring to an abbreviation of the sheriff’s department’s name.
